Lenovo Favourite To Buy Palm After HTC Steps Down

HTC, the Taiwan based smartphone maker, has decided not to go ahead with the talks to buy ailing smartphone manufacturer Palm Inc., losing out on the chance to get its hand on the Palm Web OS technology, news agency Reuters has reported.

Citing 'sources close to the matter', the article claimed that HTC had pulled out of the race to acquire Palm, leaving PC and mobile devices manufacturer Lenovo as the number one contender to acquire the company.

Commenting on the off-chance that Lenovo does acquire Palm, Lu Chialin, an analyst at Macquarie Securities in Taipei, said in a statement to Reuters that “They've got a lot more free cash and don't have the brand presence in the United States, so that will all give them that boost they need.”

Reuters claims that HTC, the company behind the immensely popular Desire smartphone, was approached by Palm's investment backers for a bid, but the company decided not to act on it after the reviewing the financial books of the company.

Palm rose to glory recently with its Pre smartphone and webOS but failed to maintain the momentum that was required to keep up with the competition. It is also credited with making personal digital assistants, known as PDA popular.

PDSs are considered as precursors to smartphones as the latter combine many of the functionality offered by these electronic filofax.